From this funny little book on “good governance” by a guy who is the president and chairman of his own thinktank and one of his senior advisers. “Confucian scholars” put a curious spin on indigeneity.

For America, democracy is an end in itself. In the post-ideological pragmatism proposed by Chinese thinkers such as Eric X. Li or Zhang Weiwei, democracy is only a means to the end of good governance. ‘If it helps deliver results, great. If not, who needs it?’ is their view.

Counterintuitive as it may appear to the Western mindset, China in many ways is more open to fundamental political reform than the US. Since the US system is based upon the notion that the state itself is constrained by a body of pre-existing law that is sovereign, any thought of rewriting the Constitution is nearly anathema.

In China, however, some intellectuals point out that the remnants of Communist Party theory posit that the current system is the ‘primary stage of socialism’, meaning that it is a transitional phase to a higher and more superior form of socialism. The economic foundation will change with broader prosperity, and thus the legal and political superstructure must also change.

That has led some contemporary Confucian scholars in China to argue that Marxism cannot be the philosophy of the higher stage of development not least since it’s a foreign ideology, and that any new form of government must be based on indigenous sources of legitimacy from within the Chinese experience – meritocratic knowledge of the governing class, the ethical obligation of ruler to the ruled, and tradition.

On March 26th in Augusta Georgia, county sheriffs saw to the disposal of food and other durable goods at the behest of Laney Supermarket or maybe a bank. The owners, referred enigmatically by local news as “the Chois”, say they were kicked out by a bank over debt. Whether they were owners independently of the debt to the bank (i.e. they weren’t in debt on the original business loan to buy the property) is unclear. They claim to have offered the food to a church, whose members never came to pick it up. Apparently either local reporters failed to ask what church so they could investigate or the Chois declined to answer.

Lan’sakes! How could this happen in America? Well, it’s not the first time, I’ll tell you what.

I worked at Fred Meyer in Portland some years ago, when they renovated the Hawthorne location to be all LEED certified. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. It’s a private sustainability credentialing business whose purpose is in part to advance the notion that the market can be used to drive progress.

I worked in the deli, which was right next to the bakery and produce section. I complained about the egregious amount of food-waste coming out of the deli alone to my fellow workers. Of course, it’s corporate policy not to allow workers to have, say, a meal from thrown-away food, even if it’s only thrown away for superficial aesthetic reasons (i.e. they think it won’t sell). Kroger’s all-too-capitalist rationale is that it would encourage workers to throw away more or at least choice food in the hope of ripping off the company. Needless to say, we already threw away more food than we could possibly re-appropriate without, in addition to say a free lunch, taking some home every day. Most of it was perfectly fine to eat when it was pulled and only really became questionable once put in a garbage can.

I complained to co-workers and eventually learned on my own about the plethora of gleaners in the Portland area. So, I talked with the store manager about it (big mistake) and he performed the sympathy farce, saying he’d send the message to his regional manager. I didn’t buy it then, but I didn’t really know what to do. It was my first “real” job, which meant a lack of attunement to the power of the workplace. I encouraged people to talk about it with customers by talking about how I did it myself, though I may have been the only one who did it.

Within a month, we got orders to start putting food in a compost-bin, which was supposed to be part of the LEED stuff. The idea being, I guess, that its more sustainable to throw food in the ground than in the garbage. Why does that remind me of a song? We also had to take these out to the special dumpster for them. The bins we kept in the store easily weighed 200lbs once full. It was a two-person job to actually hoist the thing off its rollers. Sometimes that made it easier and sometimes made it harder to give away food off the top to people who wanted it. At first the dumpster was just like the regular one, except it was green instead of blue. Within a couple weeks, we were told we had to use a key to unlock a chain put on it because people were getting into it during the day. That’s still how it works as far as I know.

So, that just goes to show you how long things have been this way, but also that big bad bankers or reckless capitalists (who are exposed by their lack of “success”) aren’t the only or even most important perpetrators of this kind of bullshit.

“It is perhaps unfair to brand either Freud or the practice he helped to create as emotionally cold. Burno Bettelheim has written in spirited defense of the humanity and direct emotional appeal of Freud’s texts, and from the reading of a case history such as [well-regarded child psychoanalyst, Donald] Winnicot’s ‘The Piggle’ it is clear that a commitment to a psychoanalytic vocabulary does not necessarily preclude openness and warmth. Nevertheless there are aspects of both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis as elaborated by Freud that obstruct rather than facilitate the human encounter, fostering distance rather than nurturing development. Indeed the next section will show how the problematic aspects of Freud’s approach distort the very concepts that he developed to understand the experiences with which he was daily confronted, particularly in his conceptualization of the unconscious …

During the last two decades, research in a number of areas of psychology and cognitive science has drawn attention to so-called subpersonal processes—that is, neurochemical or neurological processes that will necessarily stay below the threshold of our perceptual awareness because they contribute to the construction of our very sense of awareness or because they occur independently of our sense of awareness. The research draws attention, on the one hand, to a level of behavior on which our normal habits of acknowledging or denying responsibility don’t function, and, on the other hand, to areas for which there are everyday habits of negotiation and acknowledgement that are comparable to, and indeed useful substitutes for, the psychoanalytic tools of free association and the talking cure. A brief and selective consideration of recent findings can clarify the limits of the Freudian model of the unconscious and so prepare the way for an exploration, in the concluding chapter, of ways in which, dis-burdened of Freud’s model of the unconscious mind, we can return to the work of Freud and his contemporaries around 1900 to develop and everyday language for acknowledging what we unwittingly or inattentively do to and with other people.” – Ben Morgan, “On Becoming God”, 187-188.